I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the Holocaust

Imagine being a 13-year-old girl in love with boys, school, family - life itself. Then suddenly, in a matter of hours, your life is shattered by the arrival of a foreign army. This is the memoir of Elli Friedmann, who was 13 years old in March 1944, when the Nazis invaded Hungary. It describes her descent into the hell of Auschwitz, a concentration camp where, because of her golden braids, she was selected for work instead of extermination. In intimate, excruciating details she recounts what it was like.

Amazon Customer says:"Touching and Important Story - Terrible Audio Performance"

Quickly becoming a cornerstone of Holocaust historiography, this is a devastatingly stark memoir from one of the lone survivors of Treblinka. Why do some live while so many others perish? Tiny children, old men, beautiful girls - in the gas chambers of Treblinka, all are equal. The Nazis kept the fires of Treblinka burning night and day, a central cog in the wheel of the Final Solution.

The Secret Holocaust Diaries: The Untold Story of Nonna Bannister

For half a century, a terrible secret lay hidden, locked in a trunk in an attic... photos, official documents, and scraps of a diary written by a young girl. "The time has come when I must share my life story... some facts from the past that could make a contribution, however small it may be, to the history of mankind." The Secret Holocaust Diaries is a haunting eyewitness account of Nonna Lisowskaja Bannister, a remarkable Russian-American woman who saw and survived unspeakable evils as a young girl.

Rena's Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz

"I do not hate. To hate is to let Hitler win." - Rena Kornreich Gelissen. On March 26, 1942, the first mass transport of Jews - 999 young women - arrived in Auschwitz. Among them was Rena Kornreich, the 716th woman numbered in camp. A few days later, her sister Danka arrives and so begins a trial of love and courage that will last three years and 41 days, from the beginning Auschwitz death camp to the end of the war.

Our Crime Was Being Jewish: Hundreds of Holocaust Survivors Tell Their Stories

Our Crime Was Being Jewish contains 576 vivid memories of 358 Holocaust survivors. These are the true, insider stories of victims, told in their own words. They include the experiences of teenagers who saw their parents and siblings sent to the gas chambers; of starving children beaten for trying to steal a morsel of food; of people who saw their friends commit suicide to save themselves from the daily agony they endured.

Auschwitz #34207: The Joe Rubinstein Story

Shortly before dawn on a frigid morning in Radom, Poland, twenty-one year-old Joe answered a knock at the door of the cottage he shared with his widowed mother and siblings. German soldiers forced him onto a crowded open-air truck. Wearing only an undershirt and shorts, Joe was left on the truck with no protection from the cold. By the next morning, several around him would be dead. From there, things got worse for young Joe, much worse.

KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

In KL, Wachsmann fills this glaring gap in our understanding. He not only synthesizes a new generation of scholarly work, much of it untranslated and unknown outside of Germany, but also presents startling revelations, based on many years of archival research, about the functioning and scope of the camp system.

Irena's Children: The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Saved 2,500 Children from the Warsaw Ghetto

In 1942 one young social worker, Irena Sendler, was granted access to the Warsaw Ghetto as a public health specialist. While she was there, she began to understand the fate that awaited the Jewish families who were unable to leave. Soon she reached out to the trapped families, going from door to door and asking them to trust her with their young children. She started smuggling children out of the walled district, convincing her friends and neighbors to hide them.

Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

Eastern Europe, 1944: Three women believe they are pregnant, but are torn from their husbands before they can be certain. Rachel is sent to Auschwitz, unaware that her husband has been shot. Priska and her husband travel there together, but are immediately separated. Also at Auschwitz, Anka hopes in vain to be reunited with her husband. With the rest of their families gassed, these young wives are determined to hold on to all they have left-their lives, and those of their unborn babies.

In 1941, newlyweds William and Rosalie Schiff are forcibly separated and sent on their individual odysseys through a surreal maze of hate. Terror in the Krakow ghetto, sadistic SS death games, cruel human medical experiments, eyewitness accounts of brutal murders of men, women, children, and even infants, and the menace of rape in occupied Poland make William & Rosalie an unusually explicit view of the chaos that World War II unleashed on the Jewish people.

The Long Night: A True Story

The Long Night is Ernst Israel Bornstein's first-hand account of what he witnessed in seven concentration camps. Written with remarkable insight and raw emotion, The Long Night paints a portrait of human psychology in the darkest of times. Bornstein tells the stories of those who did all they could do to withstand physical and psychological torture, starvation, and sickness, and openly describes those who were forced to inflict suffering on others.

Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

When the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944, they sent virtually the entire Jewish population to Auschwitz. A Jew and a medical doctor, the prisoner Dr. Miklos Nyiszli was spared death for a grimmer fate: to perform "scientific research" on his fellow inmates under the supervision of the man who became known as the infamous "Angel of Death" - Dr. Josef Mengele. Nyiszli was named Mengele's personal research pathologist. In that capacity he also served as physician to the Sonderkommando, the Jewish prisoners who worked exclusively in the crematoriums and were routinely executed after four months.

The Polygamist’s Daughter: A Memoir

"My father had more than 50 children." So begins the haunting memoir of Anna LeBaron, daughter of the notorious polygamist and murderer Ervil LeBaron. With her father wanted by the FBI for killing anyone who tried to leave his cult - a radical branch of Mormonism - Anna and her siblings were constantly on the run with the other sister-wives. Often starving and always desperate, the children lived in terror. Even though there were dozens of them together, Anna always felt alone.

I Shall Live: Surviving the Holocaust Against All Odds

I Shall Live tells the gripping true story of a Jewish family in Germany and Russia as the Nazi party gained power in Germany. When Henry Orenstein and his siblings ended up in a series of concentrations camps, Orenstein's bravery and quick thinking help him to save himself and his brothers from execution by playing a role in the greatest hoax ever pulled on the upper echelons of Nazi command. Orenstein's lucid prose recreates this horrific time in history and his constant struggle for survival as the Nazis move him and his brothers through five concentration camps.

The Lifelong Learner says:"Gripping - Like You're in a Chinese Finger Trap"

My Brother's Voice: How a Young Hungarian Boy Survived the Holocaust: A True Story

Stephen 'Pista' Nasser was 13 years old when the Nazis whisked him and his family away from their home in Hungary to Auschwitz. His memories of that terrifying experience are still vivid, and his love for his brother Andris still brings a husky tone to his voice when he remembers the terrible ordeal they endured together. Stephen's account of the Holocaust, told in the refreshingly direct and optimistic language of a young boy, will help every listener to understand that the Holocaust was real.

Mischling

It's 1944 when the twin sisters arrive at Auschwitz with their mother and grandfather. In their benighted new world, Pearl and Stasha Zagorski take refuge in their identical natures, comforting themselves with the private language and shared games of their childhood. As part of the experimental population of twins known as Mengele's Zoo, the girls experience privileges and horrors unknown to others, and they find themselves changed, stripped of the personalities they once shared, their identities altered by the burdens of guilt and pain.

Without Mercy: Obsession and Murder Under the Influence

On any Sunday morning in the Florida Redlands, Dee Casteel might have served you pancakes at the IHOP. She was a hard-working, cheerful waitress, one of the nicest people you'd ever want to know. She was also a three-bottle-a-day alcoholic, hopelessly in love with the IHOP's manager, Allen Bryant. Bryant wanted his live-in lover, IHOP owner Art Venecia, dead. And Dee Casteel helped him to arrange it.

Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

In this epic history of extermination and survival, Timothy Snyder presents a new explanation of the great atrocity of the 20th century and reveals the risks that we face in the 21st. Based on new sources from Eastern Europe and forgotten testimonies from Jewish survivors, Black Earth recounts the mass murder of the Jews as an event that is still close to us, more comprehensible than we would like to think and thus all the more terrifying.

Karolina's Twins: A Novel

From Ronald H. Balson, author of the international best seller Once We Were Brothers, comes a saga inspired by true events of a Holocaust survivor's quest to fulfill a promise, return to Poland, and find two sisters lost during World War II.

When Hitler Took Cocaine and Lenin Lost His Brain: History's Unknown Chapters

The first installment in Giles Milton's outrageously entertaining series, History's Unknown Chapters: colorful and accessible, intelligent and illuminating, Milton shows his customary historical flair as he delves into the little-known stories from the past. There's the cook aboard the Titanic who pickled himself with whiskey and survived in the icy seas where most everyone else died. There's the man who survived the atomic bombs in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And there are many, many more.

The Master of Auschwitz:: Memoirs of Rudolf Hoess, Kommandant SS

The first-hand account of the life, career, and the practices of horror at Auschwitz, written by Auschwitz Kommandant SS Rudolf Hoss as he awaited execution for his crimes. Including his psychological interviews at Nuremberg.

The Misbegotten Son

An account of the crimes of Arthur Shawcross describes how the paroled child killer shot, stabbed, suffocated, and strangled 16 Rochester, New York, prostitutes and examines how the legal system failed his victims.

Country of Ash: A Jewish Doctor in Poland, 1939-1945

Country of Ash is the starkly compelling, original chronicle of a Jewish doctor who miraculously survived near-certain death, first inside the Lodz and Warsaw ghettoes, where he was forced to treat the Gestapo, then on the Aryan side of Warsaw, where he hid under numerous disguises. He clandestinely recorded the terrible events he witnessed, but his manuscript disappeared during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. After the war, reunited with his wife and young daughter, he rewrote his story.

Publisher's Summary

Helga Schneider was four when her mother suddenly abandoned her family in Berlin in 1941. When she next saw her mother, 30 years later, she learned the shocking reason why. Her mother had joined the Nazi SS and had become a guard in the concentration camps, including Auschwitz, where she was in charge of a "correction" unit and responsible for untold acts of torture.

Nearly 30 more years would pass before their second and final reunion, an emotional encounter in Vienna, where her ailing mother, then 87 and unrepentant about her past, was living in a nursing home. Let Me Go is the extraordinary account of that meeting and of their conversation, which powerfully evokes the misery of obligation colliding with inescapable horror.

What the Critics Say

"Rosenblat's narration captures the boastful, pitiable, and unrepentant mother in a matter-of-fact style that is both chilling and disturbing." (Booklist) "The story will bring tears to most listeners' eyes....Barbara Rosenblat's reading is astounding....the listener is chilled by the evil in her voice, and when she reads Schneider's words, the listener feels the anger and confusion that permeate the book." (AudioFile)

I found this book because I was looking for books narrated by the great Barbara Rosenblatt. She's a national treasure.

This is one of the most profound books I've ever encountered. The balance of hatred and love. The longing for love. The unremitting digging by Helga at a mother who is both helpless and sadistic. As Helga is, too. I said "irritating," because I got really annoyed at the "why didn't you love me, mother?" repeated over and over in different ways. I wanted to say, "Oh, get a life." There was a certain amount of melodrama I got tired of. But the honesty was stunning and the ambiguity totally captivating. The descriptions of the people and places are marvelous.

Helga provides endless details and digs for more. Her obsessive research is one of the best things about this book. The factual info, in this context, is somehow even more horrible.

This is a picture, closeup, of a woman whose life lacked meaning (the mother) until she found a belief and a home in the SS and somebody to hate -- the Jews. It gives new meaning to the idea of a woman's leaving home to "find herself." She found herself quite contentedly in hell. And her daughter deals with it all both intellectually and emotionally with amazing insight.

I found myself pulled into this book from the start. Barbara Rosenblat is a first class actress when it comes to reading. I think she has an amazing facility with nuance and emotion. The story is engaging, and all through the story, I felt that I was watching a play unfold on stage.

The story itself is interesting, giving a somewhat different view of the holocaust period. The story weaves personal tragedy with tragedy on a tremendous scale, and manages to hold its own. There are so many delicate touches and details in the story that it's easy to conjure the scene in the mind's eye, as if watching it on stage in front of you.

This is a true story about a woman who has only seen her mother twice since the woman was a little girl. The mother is an unpleasant character. The second visit is what the book focuses on. By the time of the second visit, the mother is not only unpleasant but seems to be suffering from senile dementia. I quickly lost interest in the mother. There did not seem to be any reason for the daughter to be visiting her. I lost interest in the story and starting skipping ahead. The narrator was excellent however.

The Narrator of this story is great, as is the story itself. I couldn't imagine being left behind by a Mother who went onto evil, and left me with a person who didn't love me. Looking for closure, in a life with a gapping hole. Sad, but good.

What made the experience of listening to Let Me Go the most enjoyable?

It tears your feelings while you are waiting for a good ending.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

I felt sorry for Helga and outraged about her mothers stubbornness and lack of acceptance.<br/>The mother might well clinge to her beliefs till the end but one kind of hopes that she would take in her daughter even so.

This book is well written and I love the narration. The accents and the descriptions really places the reader in the room during this visit with an elderly Hitler follower who still 100% believes what she did was correct. This daughter has more patience than I would have and that's good because it allows the reader to see inside a very very sick mind.

when I can't sleep at night I listen to Audiobooks and love real stories and intense ones. Anything superficial really bores me. I need to have someone reading with a soothing voice and no music between the chapters in case I fall asleep